[1] He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1943 and served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1945 as a field artillery officer in France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Japan, leaving the service with the rank of captain.

After law school, Chayes was a legal advisor to Governor Chester Bowles of Connecticut from 1949 to 1951, and then served in Washington, D.C., as Associate General Counsel of the President's Materials Policy Commission in 1951.

He clerked for Justice Felix Frankfurter of the United States Supreme Court from 1951 to 1952, and practiced law privately with Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C., from 1952 to 1955.

He worked on the 1968 presidential campaign of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, wrote articles on nuclear arms control, co-authored a book with Jerome Wiesner, President Kennedy's Science Adviser, on Anti-Ballistic Missiles and strategic policy, and advised Democratic members of the Senate in the debate in the early 1970s over ABM deployment (he was a strong supporter of the ABM Treaty of 1972).

Chayes also wrote articles arguing that the Reagan Administration was barred from testing and deployment of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or "Star Wars" under the 1972 ABM Treaty.

[4] In this publication, Chayes illuminated the interrelations of law and foreign policy decisions that created what many call the finest hour of Kennedy's Administration.

Although the Soviet Union initially responded to the proposed quarantine by accusing the U.S. of “piratical acts” and “unheard of breaches of international law,”[4] Washington lawyers took comfort in NATO support and a unanimous O.A.S.

In sum, Chayes noted the importance of the U.S. government's willingness to accept the obligation of international legal justification, and therefore, public accountability, during the successful mitigation of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

First, in an effort to formulate rules that govern future conduct for a variety of players, treaties often result in ambiguous language that does not provide determinate answers to disputed questions of interpretation.

Lastly, regulatory treaties often require significant changes in economic or social systems that, by its very nature, take time and can lead to a deceptive picture of state noncompliance.

This would ensure that conciliation efforts would be able to address a broad range of disputes, while maintaining principles of sovereignty by not forcing parties to accept the decisions reached.

Fourth, Chayes combined the elements of transparency, dispute settlement, and capacity building into a broader process of “jawboning” – the effort to persuade the violator to change its ways.

In 1996 he received the Peace Advocacy Award, with his wife, Antonia Handler Chayes, from the Massachusetts chapter of the Lawyers Alliance for World Security.

In 1999-2000, Professor Chayes led a team of lawyers suing Slobodan Milošević in the U.S. Courts for genocide in Kosovo, and helped investigate corruption in Bosnia.

Abram Chayes was widely celebrated as “a wonderfully gregarious man” who, throughout his tenure at Harvard Law School, always “could be counted upon to greet the newest faculty recruits with genuine ebullience, curiosity and good-will.”[8] He was also popular with students; one of his traditions as a teacher that as much appreciated and long remembered by his law school students was to read aloud in his delightfully raspy voice the opening pages of Bleak House by Charles Dickens at the beginning of the last class of the semester in his first-year course on Civil Procedure.

Antonia Handler Chayes served as Undersecretary of the Air Force in the Carter Administration, and is a current Professor of Practice of International Politics and Law at The Fletcher School, Tufts University.